Gluonic Colour Singlets in QCD

TL;DR

This paper proposes that certain gluon excitations, distinct from traditional glueballs, can propagate freely outside hadrons due to their neutral color charge, with potential experimental implications.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of gluonic color singlets that can propagate freely outside hadrons, based on the Abelian decomposition of QCD and the dual-superconductor model.

Findings

Gluon excitations with neutral color charge can propagate freely.

These excitations have an effective mass limited by the QCD vacuum properties.

Potential experimental signatures are discussed.

Abstract

We argue that certain specific gluon excitations, other than conventional glueballs, can propagate freely outside of hadrons and glueballs. We begin with the result that the Abelian generators of $SU(N)$ QCD can be meaningfully isolated by the Cho-Faddeev-Niemi-Shabanov decomposition. It has already been shown by Cho \emph{et. al.} that the corresponding gluon excitations have a gauge transformation whose form indicates that they are physical entities of neutral colour charge. We contend that this colour neutrality permits them to propagate freely, albeit with an effective mass due to interaction with the confining chromomonopole condensate. According to the dual-superconductor model of the QCD vacuum, this mass has an upper bound of $k_B T_c \sqrt{2}$. We conclude with some expected experimental signatures.